Yesterday morning NPR’s Andy Carvin took a break from running one of the world’s best Twitter accounts to explain what it’s like to be a living, breathing real-time verification system.

“All of this is more art than science,” he said.

In truth, it sounds equal parts exhilarating and exhausting.

As has been repeatedly detailed in other places, Carvin is the NPR senior strategist who transformed his Twitter feed into a must-read newswire about the changes taking place in the Arab world. Carvin sends hundreds of tweets a day that, taken together, paint a real-time picture of events, opinions, controversies, and rumors relates to events in the Middle East.

There are few established rules or journalistic policies for what he does. Just as Carvin is breaking ground in curation and crowdsourced verification, he is at the same time encountering new ethical conundrums that must be managed, as with everything else, in real-time.

Yet, when following his work on Twitter, Carvin seems in total control of the onslaught of information. Here he is attempting to confirm information reported by media outlets:

Prodding his followers to help him understand the context of a video:

Sharing information while noting its unconfirmed status:

Asking his followers to check in on the status of a fellow Twitter user:

Challenging a report in order to move towards verification:

Passing along a report from one of his sources on the ground:

And here he is yesterday, just minutes after we hung up, sharing a point we discussed:

We spoke about how he judges the accuracy and quality of a tweet, and Carvin said that a red flag for him is when non-journalists adopt the language of breaking news.

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